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Kate Becker: BICEP2 breakthrough ends on a cosmic cliffhanger

By Kate Becker

For the Camera

Posted:
06/26/2014 06:46:47 PM MDT

Updated:
06/26/2014 06:48:33 PM MDT

Kate Becker The Visible Universe

Back in March, the world was buzzing with the news that BICEP2, a telescope situated at the South Pole, had picked up signals from the universe's first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

The results were a breakthrough, touted by some as the biggest discovery of the century, and they offered a resolution to one set of cosmic mysteries and a brand new window into another. Champagne corks were popped, Nobels were predicted, and "B-mode polarization" became — for a moment at least — the subject of dinner table and water cooler conversation.

But then things got messy.

The BICEP2 discovery had been announced to the press and public before they'd been subjected to formal peer review. An informal peer review began, online and offline, as scientists around the world pored over the BICEP2 team's results. What they found seemed to put the whole enterprise on the brink of fiasco.

BICEP2's mission, like that of a handful of other experiments with which it is in friendly competition, is to pick out an extremely faint signal in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, an echo of the moment when our baby universe first cooled enough for light to travel through it.

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Researchers have been probing the CMB for decades, discovering in its tiny temperature variations the seeds that later grew into galaxies and galaxy clusters. BICEP2 and its competitors were looking for something even tougher to observe: a peculiar, "twisty" sort of light called B-mode polarized radiation.

Physicists think that, right after the Big Bang, the universe blew up to a hundred trillion trillion times its size or more in a fraction of a second. This sudden mushrooming is called cosmic inflation (which, I think you'll agree is a better name than "cosmic sudden mushrooming"). At the same time, space itself was fizzing with quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations, the thinking goes, grew into gravitational waves that rippled through space, stamping the CMB with a characteristic polarization pattern.

The trouble is that there are other ways to get a similar polarization pattern. In particular, dust in our own galaxy could mimic the "primordial" signal that astrophysicists are after.

The BICEP2 team thought of this, and tried to rule out the possibility based on preliminary data from a space telescope called Planck. But critics, including some close to the Planck team, argued that the BICEP2 team's analysis of this still-unpublished data might have significantly underestimated the dust — and, therefore, overestimated the strength of the primordial signal.

Now, the BICEP2 team has finally published the controversial result in the journal Physical Review Letters.

They stand behind their conclusion, but they've introduced a major fudge factor, opening up the possibility that their result is due to dust. Unable to pin down the uncertainty in the Planck sky map, they've excluded it from their analysis. To find out whether BICEP2 was a breakthrough or a botch, we'll have to wait for other telescopes to weigh in on the matter and for a deeper analysis from BICEP2. (Observations at different wavelengths can reveal more about the true source of the signal.)

Some commentators are calling this cautionary tale, a story of over-eager physicists rushing to make results public without sufficient scrutiny. These critics argue that the episode undermines public trust in science and scientists.

But I disagree.

After all, science isn't just a series of right answers. (How boring that would be!) Science is a process. And now, we all have a front-row seat to watch it happen.

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